If you thought this election was fought on a digital and social media battleground — relying on YouTube videos and tweets as much as TV debates — just wait until you see the one seven cycles down the road.

By 2040, candidates on both sides (or, who knows, all sides) will have grown up with social media. Depending on their exact ages, they'll likely remember little about life before Facebook — and nothing at all about life before the web.

The same is true of their advisers, their donors and their electorate. So what does that mean? What will the political landscape look like with Millennials in charge? Here are four scenarios for the campaign season 38 years hence.

1. Too Much Information!

Like all parody Onion stories, the report above — looking forward to the 2040 presidential election — contains a nugget of truth. In this case, we have to be careful of the social media trail each of us is leaving in our wake.

It will be increasingly hard to find candidates with a blank slate. Forty years or more of status updates and inadvisable photos will likely contain enough out-of-context embarrassment to fill a dozen attack ads.

In this scenario, will victory go to the candidate who has kept his or her trail the cleanest? Will posting only pictures that show a candidate in a positive light be regarded as a leadership quality? What happens when a candidate gets caught trying to clean up his online reputation by erasing information? Scandal?

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Odds are, this scenario won't come to pass. Attitudes are constantly shifting, and the societal norms of 2040 will look very different from today. If we all have the skeletons in our closets plainly displayed on Facebook, someone else's skeletons have less shock value, even if that person is running for president.

You can see signs of those shifting attitudes over the past 20 years. In 1992, then-Governor Bill Clinton admitted to having dabbled in marijuana in college. The news was so huge that Clinton had to qualify his admission with the infamous statement: "But I didn't inhale."

By 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama could admit to a past that included smoking pot as a student — hardly an eyebrow was lifted. "I inhaled frequently," Obama joked. "That was the point."

Granted, had someone uncovered an actual photo of Obama blazing up a joint, it might have been a different story. But by 2040, are we really going to care about a candidate's Twitpic of dorm room contraband — or will it be the new norm?

2. Radical Transparency

It's too soon to say whether Mitt Romney's "obviously inarticulate" comments about 47% of the electorate — to quote his running mate Paul Ryan — helped swing the 2012 election. But the fact that the candidate was caught on a hidden camera may well be a sign of things to come.

The video was likely shot on a smartphone — which wasn't exactly hiding in plain sight, but would you have thought twice if you saw one on a table half a room away?

Now consider that such devices may well become ubiquitous by 2020, let alone another two decades. By then, Moore's Law will have made connected camera devices so cheap and tiny, they will be almost impossible to police.

Greater security isn't the answer. It's one thing to demand all your wait staff hand over their phones before a fundraiser. It's another to ensure they're not carrying cameras the size of a grain of sand or that their contact lenses aren't secretly broadcasting to the world.

Faced with the prospect that any moment in their day could be uploaded to YouTube within seconds, candidates are going to have to face facts: They can no longer say one thing in public and another in complete privacy.

The smartest ones will make a virtue of the situation, perhaps by broadcasting their entire day themselves, by wearing cameras and being surrounded by cameras, Justin.tv style. If we're heading toward a constant live feed of any potential president, far better for the campaign to own it, and make sure it is well-lit with good audio. (You could even turn a profit by charging news organizations for premium quality access.)

Besides, if C-SPAN has taught us anything, it's that the worst parts of politics can happily hide in plain sight of the TV cameras, so long as it's dull enough. Camera-savvy candidates who can glad-hand donors, telling them what they want to hear while making it sound inoffensive to a mainstream audience, will have an enormous advantage.

3. The Road to the White House: Paved With Tweets and AMAs

We're not quite in an era when presidential candidates tweet for themselves. But we're almost there.

Texas Governor Rick Perry says he sent out all his own tweets during his short-lived bid for the GOP nomination. That fact may have caused a few anxiety attacks among his staff, but it certainly wasn't the reason his campaign tanked. If anything, it was a boon.

On the other side, President Obama Mashable pointed out when Obama did his first AMA in August, the format makes a lot of sense for politicians. Spend one hour in an online forum, answer only the questions you want (Obama tackled 10 out of hundreds) and you can win thousands of new supporters.

So will $500-a-plate rubber chicken dinners go the way of the smoke-filled room? Will campaigns become less reliant on expensive TV ads, and hence less beholden to deep-pocketed donors and corporations?

Could an entire presidential bid be funded on Kickstarter? Will Super PACs become irrelevant in the age of social media, reduced to paying ghost writers for really good attack tweets? We can only hope.

4. The Backlash

Of course, it's entirely possible that Twitter — that all of social media — won't be a thing in 2040. Millennials may be heartily sick of it by then. Facebook may be derided as inauthentic, or a phase you grow out of, with a premium placed on personal interaction. It's back to visiting diners, kissing babies and pressing the flesh.

Or we may have moved on to something even more advanced: call it hypersocial media. Easy access to medical data, cheap connected realtime sensors — these technologies could lead us into a world where it's perfectly normal to monitor a candidate's pulse rate, track his nutrition or check out her genome. (Hey, at least it's better than picking a president based on how attractive she is, or how little he sweats under TV lights.)

One thing we can be sure of: The electoral landscape, the entire political center of gravity, will change. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts we'll reach a "minority majority" around 2040 — with whites constituting less than 50% of the population.

With no one ethnic group forming a majority, maintaining some form of connection to all of them becomes more important — which is where your genomic history, not to mention a well-researched Ancestry.com profile, could come in handy.

How to Win ... in 28 Years

So you want to run for president in 2040? It's never too early to get started. Plan your Facebook Timeline accordingly. Create a list of Foursquare check-ins that show how much time you've been donating to worthy causes and serving your local community.

Think about the story your pictures are going to tell. A few cheeky snapshots won't necessarily hurt, so long as they're balanced with pictures of you shaking hands with dignitaries as a fresh-faced youngster. Oh, and make sure those dignitaries represent all races and creeds.

You'll want to cultivate a network for the long run. Is there a well-connected campaign manager in your friend list? How about a director, someone you'd trust to follow you with a smartphone camera 24/7 and still make you look good?

Try uploading and critiquing a YouTube video of yourself speaking, then practice reducing that speech to a few memorable tweets. Also, you'll want to get your genetic testing done as soon as possible, so you can head off any embarrassing questions about disease markers.

And one final tip: Think hard about your campaign promises. Though it may not seem like it, the electorate is getting smarter — roughly at the rate of one IQ point per year, on average. Fact-checking, with ever more information at our fingertips and ever smarter ways to analyze it, is only going to get easier. Fast feedback is becoming ingrained in online culture.

Whisper it low, but the election of 2040 may be fought on meaningful substance as much as style.

Mashable
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